Power conservation saves $317m in five years: commission

The Electricity Commission says installing efficient street lights is a quick and easy method for saving power. Photo / Amos Chapple

The Electricity Commission says power conservation schemes it has implemented in the past five years have saved the country $317 million as it prepares to launch an efficient street light campaign.

Savings, mainly through promoting the use of more efficient light bulbs, are equivalent to the cost of a large new power station.

Through the commission's RightLight programme about $20 million has been spent subsidising the installation of five million compact fluorescent lightbulbs - CFLs - throughout the country.

Richard Norris, the commission's director of electricity efficiency, said efficient lighting was a quicker and easier way of achieving significant savings compared to cutting other energy demand such as heating.

"It's one of those things that is not particularly sexy but is low-hanging fruit and if you're thinking of efficiency, what's the thing we can do to spend the least money and get the best results."

The commission's role itself is under threat with its conservation role likely to be transferred to the Energy Efficiency Conservation Authority after a ministerial review of the electricity sector.

Norris said the commission's conservation work now complemented the ECCA, which was concentrating on implementing the home insulation scheme.

"You've got two organisations working very collaboratively together to get a good result."

New Zealand has 330,000 street lights and they cost councils and the Land Transport Agency about $30 million to run.

Norris said the commission would next month launch an online calculator for councils to work out the costs of replacing old light bulbs with CFLs.

In domestic use the efficient bulbs typically paid for themselves within six months and bulbs lasted eight years, he said.

"It's not just the saving from the bulb, it's also the fact that they last longer and they don't have to send blokes up ladders to go and change them all the time."

Local authorities had been slow to install new bulbs because of the lack of information.

"If you get good quality information out to councils and provide it from a central source, then you've solved half the problem," Norris said.

"We've probably done nothing more clever than bringing those people together and not letting them out of a room before they come up with something."

He said the commission was also running one-day seminars for street lighting providers and these had proved popular.